Arsenal
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
Summary: Vader returns to Padme before going to face Obiwan at the lava pit.


As always, thank you for taking the time to look in on my story! It's so nice of you to bother. I've always loved playing around with might happen to Padme and her wayward little Jedi; I have a hard time deciding on one thing, so there may be more stories coming along to contradict this. This ranges my usual level of weirdness, it is supposed to take place before Vader falls into the lava pit. I do hope you enjoy! 

~Meredith 

[to the tune of "The Cheese Stands Alone"] 

__

Mere is desperate, 

She needs feedback for her fics, 

Hi-ho, the Vader-o, 

feedback for the fics! 

=========================   
Arsenal 1/1   
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory   
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com   
http://www.demando.net   
========================= 

He was not alive. Still strong, his body was untouched by the fire that would come, and though he breathed, he was quite dead. He moved across the endless fields of snow towards the high Nubian Retreat, and the moons threw him strange, grotesque shadows past the falling sheets of cold. He carried his lifelessness with him like a savage animal, desperate to feed, to find that one comforting thing. Moving over the land where it had once been spring and they had once been happy, he murdered the memories with his own hands-- those belonged to the one he had been before. Only Padme remained in that time now, golden mesh gathered around her as she smiled, turned and did a dozen other small things that her movements made unique. Deep in his throat, words lodged; saying she would not have returned here if she had not wanted to be found.

Standing on the thin ice, Vader thought he saw Padme bellow the look of glass, her body chilled by the waters and her hair adrift. In the blood sheen of his lightsaber, the curling currents looked like the hands of those that had suffered at his; they were pulling her under-- then the wind changed, ushering the snow back against the drifts, and the image's center let loose. He moved swiftly, eyes always on the yellow-orange lights ahead; they shed a little of their illumination on the palace that contained them, until it seemed to him to be insubstantial. A mere shadow. Using the Force to keep his cloak tight about him, Vader felt the metallic essence of his new name in his veins; it was like armor, encasing him, until he felt quite different from Anakin. The face might be the same, but no one could know the raw, new birth inside. 

He came, walking on the churning, semi-solid lake waters, to a small island, and once again saw Padme. This time, she was a child, with cheeks round and sweet like the blush of an apple. She lay in her underthings beneath the warm sun, with the sand cradling her and the infinite blue reaching down into her eyes. Beyond her slight form, he could see figures on the far off balcony, touching for the first time. Vader shuddered and set his jaw, using the force of his anger to banish the image; he would have her soon. It was like the playground game, the children hiding in the corridors of Mos Espa-- 'you can't hide it from me, can't hide it from me.' He came to the frozen bank, boots crushing the snow, which made a sound like grinding bones. He was followed by those he killed, always, but he knew they could not pursue him beyond her door. Now, vaulting over the balcony railing, cloak behind him like so many shadowy servants. His new silver sword was in his hand as he called to it, it came to life with a flair like the blood he had spilled. There were guards at the door and handmaidens in the hallways, neat and orderly; their eyes were filled with the fear of his presence, and because they kept him from Her, Vader hated them impartially. The handmaidens took flight, bright birds in their colored robes with their hair trailing behind them. They made bird-calls, too, little cries of worry and peered at him from their perches behind corners and curtains. At her door now, and the Darkside pushed them open for him, closing tight behind.

She had been waiting for him; it was in the strange silver flecks in her eyes, the way the delicate chair cupped her body by the widow. The shutters were open and the snow came inside, alighting in her hair like so many greedy fireflies; her hands held each other in her lap and she was shivering with the winter in her veins. He thought he said her name, or something reverent that meant the same thing; in the dim arctic light, he hurried to her side, stood over her. Impassive, her face was frozen into a china mask, eyes wide to take him in. In a movement that was not his own will, he came to kneel before her, took her chill hands in his pressed his lips against them in prayer. 

"Forgive me," he said, though he had been sure only moments ago that there was nothing for her to forgive, that he had done the right thing. Silence poured from her parted lips, a kind of wordless cry. Her hands remained in his, patient and detached.

"Ani," she said, her voice making time, so it didn't matter how long she had taken to speak.

"Vader," he replied. Her hair was damp with tears of melted snow, so that only the edges of it curled; his fingers tangled in the length, to hold her there with him. "My name is Vader." He started to say that Anakin was dead and no longer had meaning, but he did not know how to lie to her because he had done it so rarely. Padme tipped her head back until the tresses were tight between them, he could see the line of her throat and the vibration of her sorrow there. 

"There are so many of them," she said, and his own eyes followed hers to window across the room, closed and encased with a chaos of frost. He was certain she could see them, then; that it was not his own mind that made the patterns into agonized faces and vengeful hands. Looking back at her, he saw the fear in her eyes, the slight recoil of her spirit within her body; he rested his head in her lap and closed his arms around the sweet curve of her waist. "Once," she began in a soft voice that would not startle the demons, "You asked me what I wanted. I said I already had it-- I wanted someone to care about me." Her hands freed themselves from him, fluttered like panicked butterflies in front of her heart. Anguish clutched at her voice, "I'm only one person!"

"I won't them them hurt you, Padme," he said, and was echoed a thousand times in the past and future with a feeling that he had already failed. He could see in her eyes that she was trying to count them, the faces pressed to the window-- that her mind was trying to make numbers that would reach that high. The contours of her body seemed to dim in his arms.

"The angel of death gives birth to only skulls and blood and dead things," she chanted softly. 

"Stop it," his hands were hard as they captured hers, he stroked them and thought he saw blood on them in the dim light. "It's not your fault-- stop making it be your fault!"

"Ani..." she said, an oceanid, calling from far away to someone who was so distant.

"Vader," he brought his mouth to hers, poured in all the wordless language for their desperate connection. Anakin was dead, but Padme's soft white hands surpassed death, reaching out to find him. "Say it, Padme," he kissed the slope of her breast, "If you don't name me, then I don't exist." Sitting back at on his heels, he looked up at her, feeling the awe of so long ago, and waited for her permission. Padme's eyes were opal, molten amethyst, all the colors that hadn't been discovered or named yet; her lips tilted with her mystery, and she nodded, hair and snow stirring about her face.

Lifting her gently, he brought her to the curved bed, laid her in its nest. She was a snow white with her hair spread around her on the sheets; her skin was pale as he had never seen it, beyond white. Too late, he realized that she had gone away from him and left her body; all the sweet curves and delicate features were worthless if she did not occupy them, and he let out a noise of rage. 

"Don't leave me," his hands were on her shoulders, "Please..." And, in a child's voice, "Padme..." Her eyes were on him now, so vivid that for a long time afterwards they were all he could see when he closed his eyes. Her mouth moved, making words that he could not understand, but she was there, and he cradled her with his relief. She accepted his love, allowed him to take from her, but she was still almost an observer; her burnt gemstone eyes watched him, reading all that he would not say behind his dark pupils. Someone said 'I love you'-- but she wasn't speaking, so who was it? 

He fell to her then, because the darkness could not touch her. 

Later, he awoke or dreamed or saw that she had slipped from his arms leaving in them the shape of her void. He sat up, seeing the fire leaping hungrily in the hearth, feeling a fear that came from knowing a future he didn't believe in. Her lithe form was dark against the flames; he saw that she was cradling her wedding gown like a child, feeding piece by piece to the fire. Here was the veil, with it's pearls like the first blush of morning, here were the gloves that had encased the hands he'd help during his vows-- everything eaten away by read yellow blue glorious color.

Feeling physical pain, he asked, "What are you doing?"

She turned, and he saw that she'd seen his nightmares, "Dismantling." One word, and she paused, her lips held limp; "I'm taking it apart, everything-- you and me. They're going to bury us, you know, under a double head stone. We'll go right on living of course, but we'll be under there too, and that's where," she held her hands, as if to support their love and all they had, "this will be."

"It doesn't have to be that way," he said, and knew each word was false as it dropped from his mouth. She shivered in the embrace of her sheer robe; the firelight bled through it and made her a thing that defied the darkness by standing in it. In the future, fire would not bring him terror for what it would do to him, but because he could always see her in it. She sat beside him on the bed, stroking his hair like a child, searching him for the boy she once knew. 

Quietly, "I counted the Tuskens. I went back, to see." His breath ceased within him, and she continued, "Two hundred, sixty seven," and he took her hand because he had never meant for those things to touch her. She lay down beside him, and in the deep Nubian night they were together without touching.

This had to be a dream, it had to be, because the last thing she ever said to him was the name of the person screaming inside him. And, when the embers cooled, who knew what the ashes were from?

Padme opened her eyes in the morning, feeling the touch of Anakin's lips saying he would return to retrieve her, that he would not let them die in peace. His footsteps folded their sound over themselves, disappearing in the empty hallway, and she rose, weeping, though it was no where on her face. Silently, her hands worked the sheets free of the high ornamental bed, folding them over her arms like a spider's web. She had forgotten how to cry; she pressed her lips and nose into the satin none the less. The scent would haunt her, from time to time, when she was lonely and inspired to ghosts; she would simply catch it over her shoulder, proceeding or following her to some new place. Heavy with the satin lengths, she went to the door, saw beyond it the frightened faces of handmaidens. Their eyes were all the same color with their concern, and she tilted her lips at them, the remembrance of a smile.

"Please burn these," she said, passing the weight of the fabric into another woman's arms. The girls nodded as one, gone down the hallway with their concerned whispers following at their heels. 

Padme passed back into the room, stirring the smoldering embers and tracing patterns in the ash; different landscapes, whole moments that now seemed unreal. She knelt in the cinders because fire changed things, and when she rose the touch of its gray stayed with her. Her hands came to rest upon a small box with the seal for Nabberrie, and lifting the lid, she reached within to reverently hold tool belonging to each woman in her family. The box sounded empty when she closed it. She returned to her chair by the window, the morning gray and the snow came in to touch her with little sympathetic hands, and she gazed across the room at the frosted barrier where the demons waited. In a little while, she might open it and let them in. Now she held the fine silver handle of the knife in her slim hands, holding its clear crystal blade over her abdomen. Her lips moved in their own language, she watched with her lashes veiling her eyes, fluttering when snow landed on them. The blade hummed like the quick beat of a bird poised before a flower and pink seemed to draw up from her and into it's crystalline length, until the whole of it was the color of petals falling in spring. 

The clock struck nine, the glass couples at its base twirling the number, and Padme had the sudden image of Obiwan and the man who refused to answer to his real name, light blocking light over the flames in the fireplace. Triumph sour and happy in her throat, she cradled the blade like a child in her arms, paying no heed when it sliced into her skin. Softly, she sang over her garden.

"Rock-a-bye, baby..."

============================================ 

And the moral of the story is: "Women always know what's going on. Don't mess with them." ^_~

*puppy eyes* Feedback...?


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